Ever since former NRA head Wayne LaPierre was ousted from his position, anti-gunners have been casting about for new a bogeyman to scare their supporters, and Giffords has apparently decided that "gun company CEOs" are the best candidates to serve as the monsters under the beds of gun control activists.
In a new hit piece on these unnamed CEOs, the anti-gun outfit accuses them of trying to drum up fears of gun confiscation and a total ban on firearms, claiming that it's an outright fiction that their machinations are part of a slipperly slope towards total disarmament.
But there’s a big flaw in their logic: No federal lawmaker on either side of the aisle is advocating for the abolishment of the Second Amendment, and no leading gun safety advocacy group (including GIFFORDS) has called for the government to come and take everyone’s guns away. When it comes to solutions to gun violence, reasonable gun laws can and do coexist with Second Amendment rights.
That may technically be true, but the modern gun control movement was predicated on the idea of banning handguns nationwide. And while no major gun control group has called for the government to take every lawfully owned firearm away from their owners, the leader of Giffords has called for the eradication of gun ownership without delving into the details of how that would happen.
As we wrap our interview in her office, I ask how she keeps coming back to a challenge so deeply ingrained in politics. She pauses for 12 pregnant seconds.
“No more guns,” she says.
Ambler, her aide and adviser, tries to clarify that she means no more gun violence, but Giffords is clear about what she’s saying. “No, no, no,” she says. “Lord, no.” She pauses another 32 seconds. “Guns, guns, guns. No more guns. Gone.”
Giffords has tried to pretend that their founder never said those words ever since she uttered them, so it's not exactly surprising that the anti-gun group is still choosing to ignore what Gabby Giffords said to Time magazine just two years ago. But as one astute X account noted, that's not the only attempt to rewrite history in the group's attack on "gun industry CEOs".
Gifford's can only exist in a everlasting present. The past does not exist:https://t.co/1lnkxgibwX pic.twitter.com/PeZLTUy8IE
— Assault Clip, #2A Voter (@assaultclip) April 21, 2025
In their most recent piece, Giffords claims that "the gun lobby has been making “slippery slope” arguments since at least 1934, when the NRA suggested to its members that congressional legislation put forward to stop the spread of machine guns used by gangsters could one day be expanded to include 'any firearm.'"
Yet Giffords itself (along with groups like Brady) slid down that slippery slope long ago. As The Trace reported in 2021 as part of the push to confirm Giffords senior advisor David Chipman as ATF Director:
In 2018, Giffords proposed a different tact: regulating assault-style weapons under the National Firearms Act, the 1934 federal law that restricts machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and silencers. If AR-15s and similar weapons were brought under the NFA, owners would be required to register them with the ATF and pay a $200 tax.
The gun control group still has "memorandum to interested parties" it released a couple of weeks after the Parkland shootings on its website (though for how long now that their hypocrisy has been called out remains to be seen). Here's what they said at the time.
Giffords proposes that Congress require all existing assault weapons to be regulated under the National Firearms Act. This proposal would balance the rights of law-abiding gun owners with the need for increased restrictions on these lethal firearms. Congress must also address the future manufacture of assault weapons, either by prohibiting the manufacture of any further assault weapons (as it did in 1986 with machine guns), or requiring future assault weapons to be registered under the NFA. Additional resources must also be appropriated to ATF so that it can enforce the NFA with respect to these and other NFA weapons, including resources needed to modernize and upgrade its equipment and technologies. While the NFA imposes a $200 tax on the registration of each NFA weapon, that money currently goes to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s General Fund, not to ATF. That money should be redirected to ATF to fund its responsibilities under the NFA.
Note that Giffords still supported banning the manufacture of modern sporting rifles going forward, with national registration under the NFA a fallback position. At least Giffords recognized it would take a vote by Congress to amend the NFA to make that happen. Brady has contended in multiple lawsuits that AR-15s and other semi-automatic firearms should be treated as machine guns because of they can supposedly be "readily converted" to fire in full auto fashion. Thankfully every court to hear that cockamamie theory has rejected it out of hand, but that doesn't change the fact that the anti-gunners have already demonstrated that the slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy, but an inherent part of the gun control lobby's long-term strategies.
It's telling that Giffords can't even be honest with their own followers about where the group stands on gun bans; choosing fiction instead of facts, attempting to rewrite the past to better position themselves in the here and now, and bemoaning the industry's supposed fearmongering while encouraging gun control fans to be terrified of the men adn women who are helping to facilitate the exercise of a fundamental right.
